Author: Luke Feeney Consultant & Program Director The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dubai Context : The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Dubai’s (RCSI Dubai from here on) use of online technologies to manage, deliver and maintain our CAA accredited status is of relevance to all sections of the standard as it is a strategic organisational approach to accreditation management. Through the innovative design, development and integrated implementation of open source, cloud-based software, which includes a learning management system (Moodle), a document management system (Alfresco) and an electronic portfolio system (Mahara), RCSI Dubai is more effectively and efficiently managing its accredited status. Objective : RCSI-Dubai’s innovative use of online technologies for the strategic management of accreditation was a strategic solution born out of necessity to meet the document management demands of accreditation plus the geographically dispersed nature of both the RCSI-Dubai Team (at times Team members are located in Bahrain, Ireland, Jordan and the UAE) and the CAA Team members involved throughout the accreditation process. Additionally within the resource constraints that all educational institutions are facing in today’s challenging global economy, the open source ICT solutions implemented provided a significant return on investment. Through the use of online ICT, the RCSI Team were able to effectively project- manage all aspects of the initial accreditation workup, quality assurance, submission and follow- up all within a highly secure, permission and process controlled environment. Description : Following the lessons learned by the RCSI Team after our first documentation submission for initial licensure, the Team quickly realised the need for a new and better way to facilitate the generation, distribution and maintenance of the required documentation and supporting evidence of compliance. The Team needed to find an approach which assured that accreditation and its management was more than a cumbersome paperwork exercise; rather that it was “operationalized” into the daily activities of the RCSI Team. After analysis and investigation, the “new and better way” was identified as the use of RCSI-Dubai’s Online Learning Portal system to facilitate all aspects of the accreditation project including project and process management, documentation generation, sharing, management and control as well as Team task management, collaboration and communication. The particular functional capabilities of our Online Learning Portal allowed the Team to have a single, secure repository for accreditation documentation sharing, collaboration and storage as well as forums for communication and other tools to apply the appropriate rigour of project and process management.
Transcript
Author: Luke Feeney
Consultant & Program Director
The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dubai
Context : The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Dubai’s (RCSI Dubai from here on)
use of online technologies to manage, deliver and maintain our CAA
accredited status is of relevance to all sections of the standard as it is a
strategic organisational approach to accreditation management. Through the
innovative design, development and integrated implementation of open
source, cloud-based software, which includes a learning management system
(Moodle), a document management system (Alfresco) and an electronic
portfolio system (Mahara), RCSI Dubai is more effectively and efficiently
managing its accredited status.
Objective : RCSI-Dubai’s innovative use of online technologies for the strategic
management of accreditation was a strategic solution born out of necessity to
meet the document management demands of accreditation plus the
geographically dispersed nature of both the RCSI-Dubai Team (at times Team
members are located in Bahrain, Ireland, Jordan and the UAE) and the CAA
Team members involved throughout the accreditation process. Additionally
within the resource constraints that all educational institutions are facing in
today’s challenging global economy, the open source ICT solutions
implemented provided a significant return on investment. Through the use of
online ICT, the RCSI Team were able to effectively project- manage all aspects
of the initial accreditation workup, quality assurance, submission and follow-
up all within a highly secure, permission and process controlled environment.
Description : Following the lessons learned by the RCSI Team after our first documentation
submission for initial licensure, the Team quickly realised the need for a new
and better way to facilitate the generation, distribution and maintenance of
the required documentation and supporting evidence of compliance. The
Team needed to find an approach which assured that accreditation and its
management was more than a cumbersome paperwork exercise; rather that it
was “operationalized” into the daily activities of the RCSI Team. After
analysis and investigation, the “new and better way” was identified as the use
of RCSI-Dubai’s Online Learning Portal system to facilitate all aspects of the
accreditation project including project and process management,
documentation generation, sharing, management and control as well as Team
task management, collaboration and communication. The particular
functional capabilities of our Online Learning Portal allowed the Team to have
a single, secure repository for accreditation documentation sharing,
collaboration and storage as well as forums for communication and other
tools to apply the appropriate rigour of project and process management.
Description: It was of significant benefit that the Team had been using the Online Learning
Portal for some time previously for the delivery of educational services and
management of internal processes. For CAA programme accreditation the
Online Learning Portal was also used to provide the accreditation
documentation to the expert Team recruited by the CAA who were located in
the UAE, UK and USA. Although there was undoubted benefit in using our
Online Learning Portal (Moodle), it did require manual document
management and control as it was not by design a document management
system. To overcome this challenge the RCSI-Dubai Team investigated
industry standard open source document management systems which could
provide all of the innovative accreditation management features of our Online
Learning Portal with the added functionality of true document control and
workflow management. Alfresco was the open source solution the Team
selected and implemented. Now all accreditation management, and indeed
most of the RCSI-Dubai’s document and service management operations, has
been entirely migrated over to Alfresco or “DMS” (short for document
management system) as it has now become known in RCSI-Dubai. The Online
Learning Portal though still remains a critical component of RCSI-Dubai’s
integrated online technology strategy, but now focussing solely on blended
learning. The most recent addition to the RCSI’s online management system
suite is Mahara’s electronic portfolio system which is providing the Team with
faculty credential, CPD and competence management all of which will be
integrated into our accreditation management systems. As Shaw (2000)
observed, “The economy is re-configuring to reward those who learn to
exploit and leverage information and communications technologies” (p.192).
Bearing Shaw’s observation in mind, RCSI-Dubai will continue to develop its
online ICT strategic systems as information technology itself evolves, always
understanding that we need to work with the CAA and other accrediting
bodies to shift from old paradigms of accreditation submission and
management to new technologically-based approaches which can provide
benefit to all.
Evidence : Initial evidence of success of the use of RCSI-Dubai’s online technology
strategy was the positive feedback received from both the CAA core team and
the international experts who formed the Programme Accreditation site visit
team and the successful achievement of programme accreditation in 2008.
Subsequently RCSI-Dubai has also delivered its CAA Self-study review
documentation and documentation for other accreditations (e.g. DHCC) via its
online technology platforms (using Alfresco since internal migration).
Further evidence of success, which also provides insight into the impact of the
practices for RCSI-Dubai, has been the successful migration to Alfresco
(“DMS”), the college’s secure, online document management system.
Evidence : The DMS is now at the very heart of all RCSI-Dubai and the wider
Institute of Leadership functions and operations and has become “just
the way we do things around here”. Externally RCSI-Dubai has
successfully presented aspects of its online technology strategy at a
number of national and international conferences. Its consultancy
division too has implemented the very same solutions in a number of
educational organisations in Europe and the Middle East.
Benefits : Both the project management approaches and the technology used by
the RCSI-Dubai Team for the management of its accredited status are
freely available, evidence-based good practice systems and therefore
easily transferable to the education community as a whole (or indeed
any business community). All that is required is innovative, systematic
thinking and management in a highly collaborative team environment.
Through this new paradigm, educational organisations can capitalise on
the benefits of online ICT to streamline their accreditation management
processes thereby reducing the often cited “burden of accreditation”
and assuring the on-going quality of their educational services as all
organisations want accreditation that will “cost less, take less time, and
be more useful” (Eaton, 2001).
Notes : RCSI-Dubai’s future plans for its innovative online ICT approach includes
further development of the integration of its online systems (currently
Moodle & Mahara have a degree of integration) to continue to shift
towards the new paradigm of technology-managed, efficient and
effective accreditation management (“built-in, not bolt-on”) while at the
same time continuing to proactively share this good practice with the
education community. Definition of terms & literature references for
this submission available on request.
“This is a really appealing and creative synthesis of
technologies, brought together not for their own
sake, but in order to provide a more efficient and
effective framework for managing workflow and
dissemination of information. The distributed users
of the system (participants in the activities) will
surely have found this a most congenial approach”.
